ReactOS 0.4.7 released

ReactOS 0.4.7 has been released, and it contains a ton of fixes, improvements, and new features. Judging by the screenshots, ReactOS 0.4.7 can run Opera, Firefox, and Mozilla all at once, which is good news for those among us who want to use ReactOS on a more daily basis. There’s also a new application manager which, as the name implies, makes it easier to install and uninstall applications, similar to how package managers on Linux work. On a lower level, ReactOS can now deal with Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, BtrFS, ReiserFS, FFS, and NFS partitions.

ReactOS uses a custom FAT driver called FASTFAT. The hacks to make it work mean there is probably still a lot of work or some near unsolvable bugs present that stop it from running on other filesystems.

I just tried it out in virtualbox, didn’t even try real hardware. Installed VBox guest extensions. Installed Firefox and VLC from the app manager. Tried installing LibreOffice from the app manager. ROS bluescreens in the middle of the installation and after that bluescreens immediately during boot, regardless if regular or safe mode. That’s pretty much identical to what I saw in the previous versions. I suppose there has been progress under the hood, but as an end user, I don’t get to see it, when the system is still unstable as hell.

Those are beautiful pieces of engineering rendered as operating systems.

React doesn’t make that cut in my book.

Though you are right with all the OSes you described, you are not taking into account several aspects that IMO are very important and make ReactOS special:

1. The number of developers and time invested on several of those commercial operating systems is not comparable to the number of developers that work in their spare time for ReactOS.

2. Almost all operating systems you described, or are created from scratch based on their own principles, rules, designs, etc. or are free implementations of some specs (POSIX); though I am not telling that creating an OS is easy, ReactOS has the extra complexity layer of mimicking (at binary level in several layers) one commercial and already existing closed-source OS. The reverse engineering stuff done there is amazing!

3. IMO Windows itself is by far more complex than other OSes, it provides several APIs (Win32 API, COM, DCOM, OLE, DDE, DDK, DirectX, etc.) at OS level, and ReactOS implements several of them at some extent.

Its my book, my criteria for good engineering includes things like not crashing when trying to do trivial things. I don’t care that they are all volunteers, I’m not giving out participation medals. I know its a non trivial task, but geeze oh man, React isn’t pretty.

I suppose there has been progress under the hood, but as an end user, I don’t get to see it, when the system is still unstable as hell.

In the home page of their site they say it is still in Alpha, so you should not expect to have it working perfectly.

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I know, I know, as I have been following ReactOS development since version 0.0.1. I just feel that after, depending how you calculate, 15 or 20 years, it would be nice if it would emerge from alpha and become a bit more stable. And no I don’t expect it to work perfectly, but still I don’t expect it to crash on the first occasion either. When Linux was of the same age ReactOS is today, it was far from perfect, but it was incredibly stable and mature.

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Probably, they fixed a lot of problems and crashes, but that does not mean the software reached some high stability level yet.

If it crashes all the time, that’s the precise opposite of “stable” I would say.

When Linux was of the same age ReactOS is today, it was far from perfect, but it was incredibly stable and mature.

Not same scenario.

ReactOS mimicks Windows at all levels, that includes mimicking all kernel and drivers stuff, registry, Win32 API, DLL loading, etc.

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Just as Linux (with the GNU userland) exactly recreated (and eventually expanded) the existing proprietary Unices (although it did not aim for binary compatibility as it originally targeted i386 only).[q]

Creating a clone of a very complex closed-source operating system is not a piece of cake and IMO is harder than creating your own stuff.

It seems to have worked for Linux and also for Haiku. Of course, the existence of the GNU project was a major help, just as the WINE project is for ReactOS.

Anyway, if I grant your point, what is the conclusion? That it is totally unrealistic for ReactOS to ever evolve into a viable Windows replacement, isn’t it? After all, what we have at this moment is a project which tries to replicate Windows 2003, an OS that came out 14 years ago and is obsolete today. And it is still very incomplete and extremely unstable.

For end users like myself, a new ReactOS release invariably means that we can download the install CD, install the OS in virtualbox (as in my experience the chances of it even booting on real hardware are very small, also I once saw the installer ruining the partition table of a hard disk, so I am certainly not going to install it alongside any OS I rely on), play with it a little until it bluescreens, which usually does not take very long and then we give up. Rinse and repeat with the next release.

As a non-hacker I am a bit reluctant to give out advice, but I guess they should shift focus from adding new features to improving basic stability for a while. But it is their project, they can do with it what they want…

GNU userland programs mimicked functionality available on other UNIXes.

ReactOS mimicks functionality, API and ABI available on Linux. Being binary compatible to Windows is an enormous amount of reverse engineering work.

About your comment on having ReactOS as a mainstream product, I completely agree: It has its very nice technical aspects that make this project very interesting (at least for me), but having it in someproduction environment is unlikely.

About your comment on having ReactOS as a mainstream product, I completely agree: It has its very nice technical aspects that make this project very interesting (at least for me), but having it in someproduction environment is unlikely.

And that’s maybe the problem I have with the project: For fundraising purposes they made quite different claims.

Acutally it only crashed for me when I had the VM configured a certain way and had installed drivers… otherwise it doesn’t crash nearly as much as it used to for instance it runs firefox up to 47 without crashing now.

I suggest you try with a SCSI disk as the system disk instead of SATA (this works better even with real windows often enough as SCSI is simpler to emulate). Use the BusLogic device instead of LsiLogic.

Install the guest extensions from safe mode get to it with F8 during the bootloader.

ReactOS has some potential. For example, if they add an RDP client/server they could disrupt the Windows Terminal Server market among MSPs and SMBs. Same with SQL server. If they can get MSSQL server to host/run on ReactOS there’s a lot of Windows installs required for SQL that can be turned off. Domain Controller/DNS roles again could easily be brought into ReactOS through BIND/Samba and they could disrupt infrastructure server roles. That really only leaves the Exchange servers running Microsoft licensing. ReactOS seems to be making much better progress with each release now than they were in the past.

ReactOS has some potential. For example, if they add an RDP client/server they could disrupt the Windows Terminal Server market among MSPs and SMBs. Same with SQL server. If they can get MSSQL server to host/run on ReactOS there’s a lot of Windows installs required for SQL that can be turned off. Domain Controller/DNS roles again could easily be brought into ReactOS through BIND/Samba and they could disrupt infrastructure server roles. That really only leaves the Exchange servers running Microsoft licensing. ReactOS seems to be making much better progress with each release now than they were in the past.

I do agree with you about the potential if it just got done. However the sad thing is that the moment this project becomes viable for businesses is the moment microsoft will rev up the lawsuit engine to take reactOS down in court.